The creation of Israel in 1948 marked a critical turning point where Zionism transformed from a liberation movement into a state ideology characterized by ethno-nationalism, militarism, and exclusion. This transformation occurred because Israel never adopted a constitution or established clear territorial boundaries, leaving Zionism as the sole governing framework. The result was the establishment of a settler colonial state that has maintained ongoing occupation and conflict with Palestinians, fundamentally shaping Israel's present political and social challenges.
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What Went Wrong in Israel | Glenn Loury & Omer Bartov | The Glenn ShowAjouté :
We are live. This is Glenn Lowry. You are tuned into the Glen Show live. Uh I am Professor Emmeritus at Brown University and host of the Glen Show. Um today we have a wonderful uh opportunity to uh converse with Omar Bartov who is dean's professor of genocide and Holocaust studies at Brown University and the author of the new book Israel What Went Wrong. Omar, my colleague, my friend. Can I call you my friend? Dare I call you my friend?
>> Please. Yes. If if I can do the same.
>> Uh well, you're invited to do the same.
I think with considerably less risk in your case, but we'll see. Anyway, welcome to the Glen Show, Omar.
>> Thank you. Thank you for having me.
>> Uh you dedicate the book to your father, the last Zionist. Uh you were born in Israel yourself. if you're an Israeli American academic. Uh how is it that you come to this pass uh where you are uh breaking ranks? I think it it's fair to say in your critical remarks about how Israel has gone wrong.
>> Uh well, I it's it's a long process of course. Um I um as you said, I was born and raised in Israel. I I I did all the right things that a person of my generation in Israel did. Um I went to the army. I served for four years. I I shed some blood. Um I went to university.
Um and at some point in a long process, I started feeling increasingly uh critical of what I saw happening in Israel. It's a process that really started when I was still a teenager.
Uh it partly was influenced by what I saw as a soldier um being part of the occupation both in the West Bank and serving about a year in Gaza, northern Sinai.
Um I think as I came into my own intellectual awareness and as I started studying uh the first project of my dissertation research on the involvement of the German army in war crimes, I started thinking more critically uh about my own and my armies and my country's involvement in crimes. Uh and I would say that the sort of first major crisis for me was with the outbreak of the first antifa, the first Palestinian uprising in late 1987 uh which to me as I wrote to the Minister of Defense at the time to Rabin was um a a sign that the Israeli army was um going down a slippery slope of brutalization as a result of an occupation of a people that uh wanted to have its own rights. Um I would say that it still was a work in progress for me. Um from about 2015, I started teaching at Brown um on Israel Palestine and I launched a uh a research project called Israel Palestine lands and peoples which was partly also to inform myself more deeply about the scholarship about Israel and Palestine because although I grew up there and I obviously am a native Hebrew speaker, Um my own focus of research had been uh European history. Um and during those 10 years between 2015 and 2025 I um increasingly read about that wrote more about Israel Palestine.
Um and I would say that um for me the events following um the election of Nathaniel's last cabinet, the one that is still in power almost four years after it was uh created uh began yet another turning point and following October 7th uh I became totally focus focus on what was happening there and began rethinking much of what I had studied and what I learned and trying to put that both in a context um of Israeli history of Palestinian history of European history and of my own experiences. And that's really what the book is. It's an attempt to clarify to myself and to others what has happened in Israel since October 7th and what are the deeper roots of that um and where this might be heading.
>> So what went wrong? What precisely did go wrong?
>> So you know there's a there's a long answer, there's a short answer because I wrote a whole book about that. Um so if I try to distill it to a particular moment I would say that the moment is the very creation of the state. It's the year of 1948.
Um and here you you could say that in 1948 uh Zionism accomplished its goal and Zionism was a movement that was created in the late 19th century. uh by Jews living in Eastern Europe where 80% of world jewelry was living at the time. Uh which was one response among many responses by Jews to the rise of ethnationalism, anti-semitism and violence against Jews in those areas. Uh nationalisms that argued among other things that Jews did not belong to where they were living. Um and and the response there there were there were varied responses. There were many Jews, millions of Jews who left that area and went to North America.
There were others who tried to assimilate into their own societies.
There were many who joined socialism and communism.
But some of them became Zionist. So Zionism was really one response to what became the Jewish question. what what's going to happen with the Jews who are not wanted where they're living and Zionism really emulated the other national uh movements ethnational movements of where they were living in Poland in Ukraine in Russia in Germany.
Um but the difference between Jewish ethnationalism, Zionism and the other ethnationalisms was that the Jews could not stay on the land where they were living and they had lived there for centuries. Uh and Zionism argued that they should go back to their ancestral homeland. It was ancestral, historical, mythical, religious, and that was what the Jews called Israel, the land of Israel. Uh and so when Jews started migrating initially in small numbers and after World War I in larger numbers under the eegis of the British Empire um they encountered the local population which were Palestinian Arabs and that created a conflict between the two groups. So I would say that leading to this moment of what went wrong is uh are the events of the 1920s and30s where you have two aspects of Zionism occurring at the same time. One is that Palestine uh becomes in many ways a safe haven for Jews. That's what Zionism said it would create. Um Jews cannot leave Europe. um um to other places. Increasingly the US closes its gates of immigration in the early 1920s and then after the economic the great depression of the late 20s. Uh no country uh wants immigrants sadly not Jews from Eastern Europe who are not very popular in the rest of Europe. Uh and so the hundreds of thousands of Jews who managed to get to Palestine are saved and that includes my own family of course.
um those of my family, those members of my family who stayed in Poland were murdered. Uh and that's very typical story. Uh so that's one side of Zionism.
It it it sort of, you know, it does what it promised. It it it provides a safe heaven under the time the British mandate. At the same time, these Jews were coming there encroaching in larger and larger numbers on the the lands and settlements and towns and villages of Palestinians. Uh and that creates uh two types of conflict. One is the typical conflict of settler colonialism. These are people who come from Europe and colonize these lands and treat the population many ways as other Europeans treated lands that they colonized. They treat them as primitive. they treat them as not really belonging or they just ignore them. Uh so it it creates a typical settler colonial conflict but it also uh creates or or helps engender a national movement among Palestinians, Palestinian nationalism. So it also becomes an ethnational conflict between two ethnational groups. So in many ways the Jews are replicating the same conflict from which they try to escape from Europe. U they were escaping from ethnationalism in Europe. They created their own ethnationalism. They come to Palestine. The Palestinians create their own national movement. And now you have two national two national groups fighting it out um um among themselves.
And the crisis comes in 1948. So in 1948 uh a Jewish state is proclaimed.
This is a result of course of the partition resolution of the 29th of November 1947.
The British declare they are giving up their mandate. They are fed up with this conflict. They are exhausted after World War II and they want to leave Palestine.
They hand it over to the UN, a newly established United Nations, and the UN suggests to create a Jewish state and an Arab state in what had been Palestine.
Um the the [clears throat] Palestinian population and the Arab states reject the partition resolution uh and they have good good reasons to do so because the Jews by then are a third of the population. They haven't managed to create the Jewish majority in Palestine.
uh despite the large numbers of Jews that had immigrated there uh and the Jews are offered more than half of the territory and they own only about 7% of the land. And so Palestinians and Arab states around Palestine say, "Well, that's totally unfair. Why should we agree to that?" The Jews agree to it reluctantly because they want more than what they're offered but they agree to it and that creates that results in a war and during that war uh Israel proclaims uh itself as a state. It does so a few hours before the British leave mandatory Palestine. So it does so on the 14th of May 1948.
and in his proclamation uh of state which is known in Israel as the declaration of independence although that's not the official name of that document um it promises equal rights to all citizens of the state and it also promises to promuggate a constitution by October of that year.
uh now it does that because there's pressure from the UN to u for the new state to declare itself to be democratic and to give equal rights to all its citizens but the constitution is actually then never adopted and Israel to this day has no constitution. The state also never actually says what its borders are. Benguran at the time who is the leader of the Jewish community in Palestine and then becomes the first prime minister is the founding father so to speak of Israel says why should we say what our borders are let's see there's going to be a war let's see how much we we can take over and then we'll uh declare our borders but Israel never officially says what its borders are to this day and so it's at that point as I see it uh that something happens that is the dionism which was this movement in many ways of liberation and rescue and appeal to humanitarian to humanitarianism uh becomes something else. It becomes the state ideology because there is no constitution. There's no framework, no legal framework, no territorial framework. There's only Zionism. And Zionism then shows only one face. the face of ethnationalism, of growing militarism, of centralization, of exclusion, uh, of those who are not Jews, of expansionism, and increasingly in recent years, of course, um, of more and more violence toward occupied Palestinians, um, attempted ethnic cleansing in Gaza and its culmination in genocide.
you um use the phrase settler colonialism.
Uh and as you know uh many uh Zionist uh friends of ours, some of them are uh uh irate at the suggestion that the Jewish people coming home to their ancestral homeland, not representing some metropolitan center of power in London or Paris, but uh embodying the aspirations of the Jewish people to reconcile this long exile. how can they be settler colon col col colonist? Uh what do you say to that?
>> So history is always a bit more complicated than being just one thing or another thing. um if if you read um documents, memoirs, uh fiction um of Zionist uh when they come to Palestine from the very beginning uh already in the 1880s they built what they call colonot that's the Hebrewization of colonies and then they change it to the Hebrew nameot which is the literal translation that um uh they talk about settlement, they come to settle the land, they come to colonize the land, they they use this terminology and they also treat the population uh that they encounter when they acknowledge it in many ways the way uh other uh colonial groups treat indigenous populations. They see them as primitive. they see them as somehow uh marginal to their own project of colonizing that land. Now, yes, of course, Jews who come there, and I can include people like my own grandparents.
When my grandparents, both religious Jews, came to Palestine in the mid20s and in the mid30s, they felt that they were coming home. They were coming to their own land. That's absolutely true.
But there was functionally a process of settling and colonizing the land which was spoken about openly. So if you look at that history from the point of view of the people living there, that's something that Edward say wrote a long time ago. If you look at it through the eyes of the Palestinians, those people coming from Europe are colonizing and settling the land. That's the the perspective of the Palestinians as I write in the book in the opening pages of the book. I don't find the paradigm of settler colonialism sufficient because as as you say and as your friends say it does not sufficiently capture the imaginary the the emotions the motivations of the Jews who are coming from Europe. They see themselves as doing something else but functionally they are settling and colonizing a land in which there is another group of people living. Uh and it's exactly this tension that is part of the story. And if you try to ignore that you're actually ignoring how this whole process was perceived by the people living there who were subjected to Zionism. And I'll say one one one other thing about that that that I think is is important and sort of ironic.
Uh anti-semitism, modern anti-semitism from the 1870s on start speaking of Jews as not being European.
The Jews are described as oriental.
Um they're not really part of that anti-semitism. What is the term from?
It's from linguistic studies already of the 18th century where Hebrew is a Semitic language and the Jews speak Hebrew or spoke Hebrew and therefore they're Seamites and Seammites come from the Middle East. So uh you know anti-semmites in Poland in the 1930s would march calling on the Jews go to Palestine meaning go to where you belong.
But when the Jews arrive in Palestine, they see themselves as European and they act as Europeans. They bring European technology, European culture and they look on the Arabs living there as orientals.
So in that sense too there's clearly a sort of colonial aspect to what uh the Jews are doing and it's a settler colonialism in the sense that it's not extractive. The Jews are not coming there to have the Arabs work for them.
They talk about the conquest of labor because Zionism is about transformation of um Jewish life. It's about the normalization of Jewish existence. These are terms that Zionism used. That is the Jews will no longer be the wheelers and dealers.
Those who sort of um engage in what was called air business in Lufkash to these Luft mentioned these air people, they will become rooted in the land. They will work the land. So they don't want the local Arabs to work the land for them. They want to conquer the land. and they want to conquer labor. These that's the terminology that is used by Zionist.
You can understand that. But you have to think how did the local population experience that when their lands were being bought off and they were expelled from their lands so that the Jews could undertake this transformation into something else to normalize their existence and be like all other peoples.
you are distinguishing between the liberationist uh dimension of the Zionist movement on the one hand and the domination dimension of the Zionist political ideology on the other. And I I'd like you to expand on that distinction, but I'd also like you to address the uh cynics uh concern here, which is of course it ended up a domination project. How could it have been otherwise?
>> Yes. So, uh you're right. Um I've I've encountered uh two types of uh criticism um of my book, including the book's title. Uh so, what went wrong? Uh some people say well everything it was from the very beginning the very idea of Zionism was wrong. I've been told by by some people Zionism from the very beginning was a genocidal movement. Um I don't buy that. I don't think it's true.
Uh but um if it was no genocidal at least it was settler colonialist and settler colonialism usually ends up in genocide and therefore it was wrong from the very beginning. That's one type of argument. The second type of argument says, well, what went wrong? Nothing went wrong. Everything was right. Or went wrong. I I just don't get it.
And and I've seen these these sort of responses, too. So, let me address the the first one first.
And I had this uh debate although kind of not not deep enough with with Gon Levy from from Harit who asked in response to an interview I did in in Haronist why do I still hold on to those remnants of what he sees a kind of sentimentality that has to do with my own education and my own background. and he answered because you know he's my age. We grew up more more or less in the same place. He lives very close to where I lived as a child. Uh and but but he now declares himself to be an anti-Zionist and I don't. So why is it having written what I wrote which of course ends up by saying that Zionism has to be entirely discarded that Zionism is no longer a supportable ideology.
Well, I I don't uh call myself that because Zionism's the ma the main uh initial fundamental argument of Zionism was that the Jews could um um had a right of self-determination. They could uh state that they were a nation, a nation that deserved the state. Now, I'm I'm not a huge supporter of nationalism and certainly not ethnationalism. and I wrote a couple of books that show how ethnationalism leads to immense amount of violence as it has in Eastern Europe.
Um it it led to ethnic cleansing to population policies and to genocide.
Um but if you reject the idea that Jews have a right of self determination like any other group, then you have to be consistent. Then you say, "Well, I'm against nationalism. I think it's a very bad idea." And I I would agree it's a very bad idea, apart from the fact that living outside of the states is even worse. Being stateless is even worse.
And and we know that uh from what what we see today and what we saw with the fate of the Jews in uh World War II and before. Uh so if you want to be consistent then you have to say well the Jews have no right of self-determination and the Palestinians don't have a right of self-determination. No one has that right. Uh the Jews exercise it. The Palestinians have not been successful in doing so. Uh so you have to be consistent. I don't uh I would not like to deprive different groups of self-determining if they want to. So from that point of view to declare oneself to be anti-Zionist you you you have to be consistent to say I'm against nationalism alto together and if I'm against nationalism Palestinian nationalism is ethnational it's nationalism for Palestinians it's not universal nationalism.
Uh so from that point of view I think to me it's much more interesting to think and much more productive to think that Zionism actually tried to provide a particular solution to a real issue the Jews had. It was an existential issue for for millions of Jews living in Eastern Europe. And he did save hundreds of thousands of Jews who had they not gone to Palestine would have perished because they couldn't go anywhere else and did perish.
Um it uh as I said before Zionism transformed itself into something else and that transformation is crucial to understanding uh why Israel became what it became now. It became a state ideology and as a state ideology all the nastiest parts of ethnationalism which we can see in Polish ethnationalism, Ukrainian, Latvian, German and so forth uh came to the four. So that's uh one side. The the other criticism uh which is well I mean everything went right. uh there was no choice. Uh the Jews had to come to Palestine. They encountered resistance and everything that Zion that Zionism did was um yes there were some mistakes but altogether um the Jews had no choice but to take over that land. And as many people would tell you, well the Arabs could have gone to other Arab countries. Uh what what what I say to this is the following. and and that's to me is very crucial if we try to understand what is the main issue for the state of Israel.
Uh why is the state of Israel involved since 1948 in fact long before that you can go back to 1936 or 1929 or 1921 um with the settlement Jewish settlement there. uh why is the state engaged in so much ongoing violence? Why is it still now uh engaged in a war or violence at least in Gaza, the West Bank, in Lebanon, with Yemen, with Iran? Why is that?
The main reason for this is that the state has never decided what it's going to do with the fact that there's another population living there.
It has always tried to ignore it or to push them out or to oppress them. It has never decided and it tried a little bit in the 1990s and failed largely because of massive right-wing opposition in Israel itself and the assassination of Rabbine.
It has never decided to resolve the main the core issue of its own existence.
Certainly since 1948 with the creation of the state. How do we square the circle that between the river and the sea there are 14 million people 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians.
7 million Jews have rights. They live in more or less a democratic state.
Although democracy in Israel is very rapidly eroding right now. Uh the 7 million Palestinians, two of them are Israeli citizens, but with limited rights and increasingly limited rights.
3 million live in the West Bank, they have no rights. They live under an arbitrary military regime. And 2 million, as we know, now live unhoused with not even the basic uh humanitarian infrastructure to survive.
Israel has refused consistently to face up to that problem.
And this is the reason that it cannot normalize its relationship with the rest of the Arab world. It has peace with Egypt. It has peace with Jordan. Saudi Arabia offered peace already in 2002, long time ago. The Gulf States would like to have peace with Israel. The only problem is that it refuses to do something about the fact that half of the population under its control [clears throat] in the state that is from the Jordan to the sea lives under completely different regime that it has created an apartheite system in the West Bank. Um without resolving that Israel cannot be a normal state. And let me say one last thing about um settler colonialism. As you asked before, it is true that when the Jews start coming in larger numbers in the 1920s and 30s to Palestine, they are not coming uh as representatives of a particular state because they don't have a state. But what one forgets and what is crucial to understand and in Israel people often don't want to refer to that is that the Jews can come to Palestine.
It can create the infrastructure of a state because the British government already in 1917 issued the buffer declaration.
The buffer declaration then was rolled into the mandatory papers that provided Britain with an international sanction to rule over Palestine in which it says that the British government will tellreate a Jewish national home in Palestine. It doesn't mention uh any national home for Palestinians. It mentions a national home for Jews in Palestine. And so the work that was done uh to create the infrastructure for a state in the 1920s and 30s was done under the eeges of the British government. And without that, as Theodor Herzo understood even in the early 20th century, you know, the father of political Zionism, the Jews could not create a community in Palestine without the help of an empire. He appealed first to the Ottoman Empire. Then he appealed to the German emperor and eventually after his death uh Khitzman uh the other great leader of Zionism managed to persuade the British authorities to issue this declaration and to commit themselves to the creation of some kind of Jewish political entity in Palestine. without that um Jewish settle colonialism or Jewish nationalism or a Jewish faith would have remained a dream.
>> Well, your uh critics are going to say uh Jew hatred is at the root of the reason that this hasn't this problem hasn't been resolved. that from the rejection of the UN partition forward their uh rejectionist have said no never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity and uh that frankly it's anti-semitic to put at the feet of the Israeli Jews the responsibility of the Jew hatred of the Arab nation surrounding them uh who set upon them the infant country sort shortly after declaring independence. So what do you say to that?
Yeah, look, I mean, um, the the state of Israel over time, not not immediately by the way, but over time and certainly in the last few decades, has used two uh related uh tools, two related instruments, two related allegations to uh thwart any criticism of Israeli policies and especially um any criticism of the fact that Israel uh for most of my life between uh when I was 13 in 1967 when Israel came to occupy uh many of the Palestinians that it had expelled in 1948 by taking over Gaza and the West Bank until today when I'm 72.
So for most of the existence of that state that Israel has been an occupying and increasingly oppressive and brutal occupying force. So the the criticism of that and it's very hard to justify um being an occupying power an oppressive power for so long and yet to present yourself as the as the villa in the jungle as um Barak the the prime minister the Labor Party prime minister called Israel or as the only democracy in the Middle East.
How do you thwart that? Well, there are two related mechanisms.
uh one is to say that any any criticism of Israel is anti-semitic and that of course has been rolled into now the IH the IRA definition of anti-semitism which most u people who know anything about anti-semitism and write about it have rejected including the man who actually participated in formulating this definition and the second is to um um uh refer to the Holocaust is is to say you cannot blame Israel for um its actions to defend itself uh because it is defending itself from another holocaust. And nobody has a right to blame Israel for using force uh even excessive force against those who uh attack it who it perceives as an existential threat because the nations of the world stood by and did nothing while the Jews were murdered in Europe.
So that is the conclusion that we will use whatever force we need and to hell with any international law or any international sanctions they have no moral standing visa vas so these are the two main arguments now they often become ad homum so you know yes I've I've I've been called called a safe a self-hating Jew an anti-semite I these kind of arguments whether homminum they tell you more about the person making them than about the person toward whom it's making and and there's no point to even talk about it. I I I I don't engage in that kind of of conversation but to think about what this has done uh what is the actual um consequence of this kind of argumentation. You can see what it has done. You can see that when you use when you try to shut down criticism of Israeli policies which are clearly indefensible. If you see what Israel did in in Gaza, uh if if you see how the IDF has killed a minimum of 72,000 uh people in Gaza, the majority of them civilians, most of those civilians children and the number the numbers of course are actually much higher than that, but these are the numbers that the IDF itself has recognized already. uh and you try to defend that by saying that if you criticize Israel for doing that uh you are an anti-semite then you are using uh this allegation of anti-semitism uh to shut people up to um to um sanction what is obviously uh something that should be uh condemned. Um, and you're opening the way, which is perhaps even more dangerous.
You're opening up the way to actual anti-semitism.
Because if you use allegations of anti-semitism to stop to shut down uh criticism of what is clearly indefensible, then people do come and say, well, who are why is this happening? Who are the people who are pushing for that? What are the secret sort of un invisible forces that got campuses shut down? They got university presidents to to bring in the police to arrest students, many of them Jewish students, on allegations of anti-semitism because they were angry at using American taxpayers money to destroy schools in Gaza. Who are the people behind that? And the argument that appears and I know Glenn that that you you are well aware of it is an anti-semitic argument that behind that there's some kind of Jewish cabal uh those who control Hollywood who control the mainstream media who control finance and Israel which is now controlling American politics. These are the kind of arguments that are raised in response to the uh irresponsible use of such allegations of anti-semitism uh which are not only unwarranted but are an attempt to justify what is obviously criminal.
>> But now the critic is going to say you're you're blaming the victim here.
Uh those arguments are old. uh they're they're not unique to the post Gaza situation and uh they are anti-Semitic and uh the Jewish conspiracy controlling the media, the financial mogul pulling the strings that's as old as the protocols of the elders of Zion. Uh so how is it that you come to lay the responsibility for this anti-semitism at the feet of the people who advocate on behalf of the Zionist project? They will say. Moreover, they'll say, I heard no mention of kamas of the character of the resistance of the uh exterminationist ideology of the resistance. Uh I heard no mention of October 7th uh of the slaughter. Uh what do you expect people to do in the face of that? Of course, they will invoke the Holocaust because it was Holocaustike in its effect. Uh, so you sound uncharacteristically unsympathetic to the underdog here.
>> So let me let me talk about that a little bit. Um, in in um, uh, Israel Palestine, uh, the Jews are not the underdog. Uh, in Israel Palestine, there's one very powerful army. Uh, it's the most powerful army in the Middle East and it's called the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces. The last war that Israel fought, a real war, was in fact the war that I was in, the war of 1973 when the IDF fought against tanks, against artillery, against air force of the enemy. Since then, all the wars that Israel has fought have been wars of choice and have been wars against insurgents. and many of these insurgents including Hamas and uh the consequence of Israeli policies.
Hamas was created by Eric Shaun. Uh he promoted Hamas because he thought that he would be a counterweight to Fatak which which was then the most militant resistance group. And he thought Hamas these are religious fundamentalists.
They provide school and care for the poor. Uh they're they're not fighters.
And of course, it turned out to not have been a particularly good choice.
In the north was a clear result of Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
Israel is still engaged in that invasion. It's done it over and over and over again, getting exactly the same result, which as Einstein will tell you is probably a sign of insanity. Um, now Hamas itself, Hamas is of course a very extreme organization and what it did on October 7th as I write very clearly in my book and as I wrote over and over again and and and I write it because I I think it what Hamas did on October 7th was a war crime and a crime against humanity. And if you want to connect it to the original Hamas charter uh which is has all kind of anti-semitic um passages in it lifted directly from the protocols of the elders of Zion. This you know fabrication by the Russian secret police and the early 20th century. It's also anti-semitic and it you could say that it's genocidal.
So Hamas is not a particularly good partner, which is by the way why Benjamin Netanyahu was so eager to keep Hamas in power in Gaza and spoke about Hamas as being an asset for Israeli politics. Now you you'd say why would Hamas be an asset? Hamas are a terrible organization. They they they want to kill the Jews. Well, first of all, they can't because Hamas had at at best 20 30,000 young men armed with AK-47s, a few rockets and and RPGs um and um grenade throwers. That's about it. And he was facing the most powerful army in the world. the fact in in in the Middle East, the fact that the IDF uh failed so miserably in the first two days against Hamas when they attacked was because of Israeli arrogance, not not because the information was lacking or the ability was lacking. So why would Natanya have wanted to keep Hamas in Gaza and allowed for millions of dollars coming from Qatar to be handed over to Hamas in money bags for years uh by Israeli agents. The reason is simply that it was the best way to ensure that he would not come under pressure for any territorial compromise to say, "Well, Hamas are these crazy fanatics and we don't have a choice. We just have to mow the lawn. We just have to keep them there and every once in a while send in our jets and and bomb them to oblivion until they start growing again." So yes, Hamas is a a violent organization, but it is a product of Israeli refusal to come to terms with the fact that Israel is an occupying power. And here I'll say something about resistance because while resistance uh uh is justified, crimes are not.
Resistance to occupation, just as resistance to slavery, just as resistance to injustice is justified. It's morally justified.
And resistance to occupation, which is illegal, is legal in international law, including armed resistance. It's not criminal. What is criminal is occupation and oppression. What is justified is resistance, including armed resistance.
What is not justified is to carry out massacres, to be in breach of international law. Similarly, Israel has a right of self-defense. No one disputes that. But the right of self-defense does not give you the right to be in severe breaches of international humanitarian law or to carry out genocide. Genocide is not justifiable at all. You can't say, "I had no choice. I had to carry out genocide." And so in that sense, this this attempt to find a balance and to say, well, Hamas are terrible people. We had no choice and therefore we had to go and obliterate Gaza. That is not an argument that would hold more water or legal water. And it also obiscates the core issue, the fundamental tension. Um and and let me say one one one last thing on this. Um, one result of these kind of policies uh of this kind of uh insistence uh by Israeli governments over a long time that we want the land but we don't want the people. So those people either will force them out, we'll make their lives as miserable as possible so they will leave uh or we'll just keep them uh behind the fence uh as was done in Gaza.
will besiege them um behind the multi-million fence. Those policies have an effect on the people who um exercise these policies. They change the state that does it.
This kind of uh dehumanization of others, dehumanizes yourself, corrupts your own society. what you see happening in Israel now and Israel is in in in in profound denial of what was done in its name by its own people in Gaza what it does it's er it it erodess the moral ethical fiber of the state itself of society itself and we can see it right now it is happening it also undermines the actual rule of law and democracy and both of those are quickly eroding in Israel And if in the next election, if they happen, if and if they run uh decently in October, if Natanyao wins, then I don't see a future for Israeli democracy, rule of law, or anything resembling a liberal society.
>> Mark Sesman has a question.
>> Hi, Omar. Uh so I I wanted to go back to something you had said earlier about um finding the characterization of Zionism or the reduction of Zionism to settler colonialism uh insufficient because it excludes the imaginative dimension, the aspirational dimension of and the and the and the necessary dimension, you know, at the time, the existential threat. Um, now I I I think back to when I was uh younger and and going to Hebrew school and all of this and the Holocaust was such a an important element of how the necessity of Israel was described and of the personal necessity of Israel was described. You addressed this in your book, right? It's always there if you need to go there, right? It's always a place where Jews can seek shelter should you ever need it. Um, and this has a very powerful hold on the self-conception of Jews in America at least. This notion that it is there as a shelter. In other words, we are always um uh embattled in some way or that there is an everpresent threat even if it's not visible to us. Um, and subsequent attempts to try to and and and of course this is coming down from an older generation who are the children of Holocaust survivors. Um and I subsequent attempts to reconcile that vision of Jewish identity visav Israel and what is happening to the Palestinians or what Israel is doing has done to the Palestinians has never really penetrated into that self-conception. And it seems to me that if any kind of movement is going to happen in the position of most American Jews, I don't know about Israelis, but most American Jews in regard to this problem, that imaginative dimension that is the the the um the legacy of uh of the Zionist aspiration is going to have to change or be addressed. And that seems to me to be almost a harder problem in some ways than devising a technical or formal or territorial solution to to how you partial out land rights etc etc etc. I mean h how do we even begin to address this problem?
>> Yeah look I mean I think you you're hitting on a very important issue. It's more >> can you expand because I don't really understand the problem that Mark just outlined. So if you could help to clarify that.
>> Well, I I think that that what Mark is asking is the following. Um, American jury in particular, it's not only American jury, but mo most significantly, American jury has developed a particular relationship toward Israel.
um that wasn't like that from the beginning but certainly since the 1970s uh there's a very close and very intimate relationship toward Israel and it's not necessarily the Israel that exists but the concept of Israel uh and within that there was also a a development of a of a concept of Zionism not necessarily Zionism as that ideology that was created in the late 19th century and said the Jews had to go and live in Palestine Because many American uh Jews who say they're Zionist have no intention of living in Israel. They go there, they visit, they may meet someone and marry them, but they they ultimately live in America, but as a matter of identity that is part of who they are and and it's a kind of love. It's a kind of um um intimate relationship to the state and the state is also there. And maybe that's the beginning of it um as a safe haven. And the notion of uh Israel as a safe haven really comes to the four after 1967 um and 73 but especially 1967 the war of 1967 because in the in the weeks before the war there was a very strong sense and that's not only an American jury I was living then in Britain it's definitely in the UK and in France among Jews who really didn't care much about Israel and thought of it as this sort of oriental outpost with a few crazy Zionists Suddenly when they think in those weeks leading to the war when when Gamal Abdas the the the president of Egypt says that we're going to throw the Jews to the sea and so forth they feel suddenly that state is very important to them. They become very anxious that that state will disappear. um that evolves into a very strong uh emotional tie to the land which in many ways is not uh tremendously influenced by the nature of that country itself. It's it's internal and you can go to Israel and find what you're looking for and you don't look at what you don't want to look. So you go on these birthright trips and if you don't go to the West Bank, you don't you don't go to Hebrron, you're only in Tel Aviv or in a nice kibbut, then it still conforms more or less to your idealized view of the state. And that worked for a long time. Now there's a crisis and I would say that the crisis is on two levels. One level is simply what Israel has done that after October 7th, the response of Israel to the massacre by Hamas was so disproportionate, was so extraordinary, was so deadly. Uh there's no comparison between that and anything that Israel did before. and the scale is completely different that it has become very difficult for uh many American Jews certainly of the younger generation to feel that they can support it to feel that they can somehow keep that intimate link with that country uh which is why many uh young American Jews that I've spoken with start declaring themselves now as anti-Z Zionist. When they say that they're anti-Zionist, they're really saying, "Well, I was a Zionist and now I'm not." They don't really think all the way, what does it mean to be anti-Zionist? It's just anti. It's I'm not what I was because I can't because how can I be a supporter of that? And and it has to do uh with a particular ideology that has evolved in Israel, which is blatant. you saw now with the Benville just the other day uh saying you know um holding all these captive um Europeans from the flotillaa um for a few hours just like Israel treats Palestinians which finally brought about outrage from Europe that hasn't shown that outrage when this was done to Palestinians but now it's their own citizens uh and saying we are the landlords We are the owners of the house. That's the literal translation. We are the bosses here. Meaning that is the distillation of Jewish supremacy.
And for young Jews living in the United States to think that they would have any kind of relationship with the state that proclaims this kind of ideology is abhorent. So it creates a huge crisis.
What are we then? How do we redefine ourselves as Jews? If we did that for the last 50 years through that association, not always deeply thought through with Israel and with Zionism.
The second crisis that Mark didn't raise but I think it's very important uh many American Jews and I'm I'm not one of them but I'm I'm a totally secular person uh but many American Jews have a religious affiliation. They belong to a synagogue. It's part of their community. They they have Jewish rituals. They they are conservative.
They're reformed. whatever they are, but they feel that they are also religiously Jewish in on some kind of level. The kind of Jewish religion that has evolved in Israel, is completely different. It's gone from being conservative, Orthodox, which it always was, into a religion that has no equal in Jewish history since the time of the Zealots in the, you know, the rebellion against the Romans. It is fanatic.
It is messianic.
It is undemocratic completely.
Uh, and it's Jewish supremacist and ideologically Jewish supremacist, deeply racist. Now, no Jew living in the diaspora can support that. It's it's it's it's shooting oneself in the foot.
You can't be a Jewish supremacist in the United States. It makes no sense. Uh, so what do you do? How do you define your own Judaism when there is now half of the Jewish people in Israel? That's that's half of the Jews in the world now subscribe to some version of Judaism which is impossible for Jews in the diaspora to identify with. What does that do to Judaism? It's supposed to be this one religion with different varieties but we all respect different varieties of that religion.
How can we be affiliated with that? So I think there's a profound crisis and I actually think that because of Israel's actions which I do believe uh providing a trigger to anti-semitism. Obviously anti-semitism existed before the state of Israel and if the state of Israel ceases to exist for some reason anti-semitism will not go away. But right now Israel's actions are providing excuse for a rise in anti-semitism. And I think the Jewish communities around the world know that and in the long run if this continues they will have for their own safety to distance themselves from that country. They won't want to be associated with a country that is exercising such policies against another population uh that is so brutal um that is so racist. So this is a major crisis.
I know some people have been writing about it. Sha McGee and and um >> Peter Bard >> and Peter Bard uh have been thinking about this. Uh but this is not something that will be resolved. It's it's it's a fundamental crisis.
>> Yeah. I just really quickly I do I remember on my birthright trip which I was talked into going on by my brother.
Um they took they took us to Msada and explained the story and everything and I asked one of them why they were taking us here specifically when there was so much else to see. And the guide had said that this was you know a kind of core um uh story that sort of lent um you know meaning to to uh to Judaism.
And I said, "I I don't think you should be telling this to American Jews. I don't think that they feel this way. Um I find this uh profoundly creepy." And and she had not no idea what I was talking about. None at all.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and you know, and the story of Msada uh for much of the diaspora had been shanted aside um because it didn't really reflect the kind of Judaism that that developed in the diaspora. uh of of an entire u group of Jews ultimately, you know, first they they rebel against the Romans. Uh then when they see that they're going to be defeated, that the warriors kill their own wives and children and then kill themselves. So it's a story of mass murder and that was taken up by Zionism already in the 1920s when they started excavating there. And now Misada Msada will never fall again. This is uh uh the the slogan uh that was used. It's a slogan that connects to the other major element in um in Israeli understanding of the past which is the Holocaust and Msada is connected directly to the Holocaust. Msada was the moment in which Jews fought back and when they could not win they they heroically murdered their women and children and committed suicide and we are supposed to that's where you take paratroopers to be sworn on the flag right to swear allegiance to the state we would do the same right we would be as heroic as them when I was growing up in Israel uh the Holocaust uh was not an episode that the state was terribly proud about because the notion at the time was the Holocaust was an event in which most of the Jews went like sheep to the slaughter.
Uh we as an we don't go like sheep to the slaughter. I was the first generation born in the state of Israel.
We were taught to carry guns and to be tough and to always fight back. Um and so that model of Jewish existence was shameful and we didn't want to talk about it. There were some examples there there was the ghetto uh the war of ghetto uprising. Those were the heroes.
We would be like them. We we would die rather than surrender. This was the kind of education at the time. the Holocaust, the role of the Holocaust in Israeli uh self-standing uh was transformed uh especially in the 1980s and it's also a result of these two wars of 67 and 73 and then the rise of the right wing uh under and be in 1977 that's the first time that the right wing moves into power in Israel and Beggan coming from Poland and having his own memories also of the Holocaust post begins to make illusions between Israel's conflict with the Palestinians and the Nazis. In 1982, he speaks about Arafat in Beirut like Hitler in his bunker, which is there's no connection between the two, but in his mind, there is. And the Israeli public begins to think through that so that the Holocaust stops being something that happened in the past that we need to commemorate and remember, but it becomes an imminent danger. And I I I find that so extraordinary because the farther the Holocaust moves in time, the few and fewer people actually live through the Holocaust.
Most of them have passed away. Uh and the the greater Israel's military hegemony in the in the Middle East. As I said, it hasn't fought any real war since 1973. And there's never been an existential um danger to Israel since 1973.
Uh Hamas and Hbala are not going to conquer Israel. This is fantasies.
They can't even if they wanted to and they don't really want to either, but that's a whole other question. Um the more Israel is powerful, the more the Holocaust comes to play a role in saying we are under existential threat.
So the very state that was created as an answer to the Holocaust that would be a safe haven to Jews becomes a country that is paranoid about any threat is an existential threat. If it's existential, it's like the Holocaust. If it's like the Holocaust and the enemy are like the Nazis and Hamas are called Hamas Nazis in Israel now. And if they're like the Nazis, what do you do with them? You have to obliterate them all. And so this memory of the Holocaust which has been weaponized becomes basically a tool or a license for genocide. And if you try to justify genocide with genocide then you end up exactly where we are right now.
>> So I have a question actually it's for both of you and it is in effect. What is someone outside of the Jewish community who's appalled a by the developments within that community that have been described here and b by the spillover consequence of those developments for my own country and its foreign policy and its moral standing and its place in history to do what is this an internal debate or is is who has standing >> to say to a Jewish your understanding of your religion is uh deeply immorally compromised and uh his you know dangerous.
>> That might be a non-starter for a conversation. [laughter] I don't know how >> I'm not actually saying it. I'm just asking about who could say it.
>> [laughter] >> Well, I mean, I wouldn't think of it in terms of I mean, personally, I wouldn't think of it in terms of like individually, you know, trying to change a mind exactly like that. But do you have a stake? Of course you have a stake. You're a taxpaying American at the very least whose money is being used uh to support this cause. And there are all of the reasons why besides besides genocide, uh this is not good for the world at large. And it's not good for this country to be lashed to have our interests lashed those of of any other nation this tightly. And and especially of one that has such disregard for the values that we ostensively hold. So you have that argument. I think you have a basic moral claim which is not to question the uh religious feeling of any individual but to say that there is a great wrong happening and and not to feel cowed by the sense that you're not authorized to talk about it because you don't happen to be a part of the group that's perpetrating it. When has that ever been a qualification for decrying a great wrong? So, I have to be a white southerner in order to decry slavery or Jim Crow. That doesn't make any sense.
Uh, we've all we always, >> you know, I have said it and I got my head handled before. [laughter] >> I know. I know you have. And I'm very proud, very proud to be a part of the show. Uh, that is one of the reasons.
>> Yeah. Look, I I would say um I mean I agree with what Mark said. Uh I'll say the following. Look, the United States and Europe even more uh feel uh two things about Israel. I would say there is a sense of um kind of vague but but but profound moral uh responsibility for that state. Uh it's not always been at the same intensity but there are all kind of cynical aspects to it as well. But there is a sense that certainly after the Holocaust um the west has a responsibility uh for that state. Um and I think we need to um um consider that. The second is that Israel has come to play a strategic role for the United States and for Europe uh in their policies in the Middle East. Um these are not always particularly savory politics but it is the fact that Israel has been considered over time increasingly so uh certainly after 1967 as a kind of the European and especially American extra and biggest aircraft carrier in the region. uh these these are two elements that mean that Israel is not just a matter of you know how we feel about it or how Jews feel about it.
It's a much bigger issue despite the limited size of that country and its population. Now I would say that if you care whether you are a German chancellor or an American president or a French president or a Polish prime minister, if you care about that state and if you feel a sense of responsibility for it, you know, as Chancellor Angela Merkel said, uh, Germany starts the the the the reason of state for Germany is the protection of Israel.
You should think what does that mean?
And I think what it means is if you feel responsible for that state, you have to see what is happening in it and you have to help it against its own demons that have taken it over. You have to say yes, we support the idea of a state. We support the state. We do not support its politics. We do not support Jewish supremacy. We do not support violent occupation. We will help that state whether it likes it or not, including by massive pressure on that state to reform itself. Not because we're against the state, but because we think that state has gone in a completely wrong direction. And if it doesn't want to listen to us, then we will leave it on its own. And if Israel is left on its own, without American arms, without American political cover in the Security Council, without being a member of the European Union and the the huge amount of economic support that he gets from the European Union, then it will be put in its place. then the the center of Israeli politics will go back to Jerusalem and it will be forced willingly to actually conduct politics rather than only war. So that's I think one very important element here and for American Jews and it is uh you know quite a powerful group within the United States. Um, I think that for American jury, for the leadership of American jury, the sort of kneejerk um, support of Israel is now um, counterproductive.
The most important thing for [snorts] American jury and other people who care about Israel is to put pressure on their own government. To put pressure on Israel, to force it, literally to force it through sanctions, through real political, economic, and military pressure to change its ways because that country is destroying itself. It's not only, of course, it's first of all destroying Palestinians, but it's destroying itself. It's digging itself into a hole that over time it will not be able to emerge from. It will become a pariah state. It's well on the way to becoming that. And so, if you care about that country, you shouldn't support it to say it's fine what they're doing. You shouldn't deny what it has done. you have to go against this policy because you want to help to help that state uh redefine itself. And redefining Israel now as I see it means discarding Zionism and recreating the state going back to 1948 and recreating the state as a state of all its citizens between the river and the sea. There there there is not going to be any partition. There may be two states but if there are they will be in confederation with with each other but right now there's one state in which people live under different regimes some regimes more equal than others. Um, if you want to uh uh reverse the process of Israel becoming a full-blown apartheite state, it is time to step in now and to force that states, its leaders and much of its population uh to face the limits of their own power and to see where their leaders are leading them.
>> I have to ask you, oh here's Robert Patton Spruel who has a question. And I I don't want us to leave this conversation, Omar, and I hope that you can allow a little bit more time because you are a historian of genocide studies.
You have accused uh Israel of perpetrating genocide in Gaza and I think you >> [clears throat] >> uh deserve the opportunity to expound that position and defend it. But Robert, hey, thanks Pop. Um, professor, uh, I want to show a short video of, uh, President Truman reflecting on the formation of Israel. And as an African-American, how much of this am I actually responsible for? And then part two is, what would happen if the American people decided to end military support for the state of Israel? And then my last followup is, do you know why Paul Krugman is always wrong? If you don't, move past that. But it's a whenever I talk to smart people, I just like to check on >> It's not because he's Jewish, though.
But >> Well, I didn't see it was I just It's How is he always wrong? Um [clears throat] that was a classmate of mine at MIT back in the 1970s, Paul Krugman. I don't always agree with him, but he's a good economist.
>> Sorry. If you know, just throw that in there as well.
>> Anyway, no, the the first two are important questions. Can you run the video, Nikita, please?
>> We had several other uh people in the country, even among the Jews, the Zionists particularly, who were against anything that is to be done if they couldn't have the whole of Palestine and everything handed to them on a silver plate so they wouldn't have to do anything. It couldn't be done. We had to take it in small doses. You can't move uh five or six million people out of a country and fill it up with five or six million more and expect both sets of them to be pleased.
So is this is this our fault?
>> Yeah. You know, he he uses the term silver plato, silver platter. There's a very famous poem uh in in in Israel, which is called we are the silver platter. And it's about um well it's two dead um a male and a female very young dead soldiers who come in front of the nation after the war of 1948 and say we are the silver platter. Uh we are those who brought to you the state. So it's about the sacrifice of the youth for the creation of the state. uh and it's it goes back to what H vitzman one of the the fathers of Zionism said is not given to a people on a silver platter. So that's the the poetic response by Natan Atman who was a very important poet at the time. Um, look, I mean, uh, the United States u plays a very important role in the um, it it's among the first states to recognize the state of Israel. Uh, and although as you see in Truman's response, it has some ambivalence and that ambivalence is not only as he presents it about moving millions of people to one place so that millions of people can come to it. It had to do also with oil interests at the time with strategy. Uh Truman was also deceived. I write about that in the book. U because he demanded to see the proclamation of the state before the US recognized it and he was given the proclamation but he was not given the final draft. And in the draft that he was given, the state declared its borders to be the borders of the partition.
But that does not appear in the actual proclamation. And as I said, the state has never said what its borders are. So Truman plays a a complicated role here.
Do are Americans in that sense responsible?
Uh yes, of course. And and I think you know we we have to recognize the moment at which all of this was happening. Uh the creation of the state 1948 it's also the year in which the genocide convention is endorsed by the UN. Uh it's 3 years after the Holocaust.
It's 3 years after a third of the Jewish people are murdered. And so I think there there there is a powerful sense among politicians and among many Europeans including Americans of some kind of um um responsibility, some kind of that it is time to let the Jews have a state of their own. And I think Truman who had a sort of Zionist uh Christian Zionist uh predelection was part of that as well. So in that sense I think yes. Um but you had another question right?
>> Yeah I yes I have the other question if um Nick I just sent you a a quick link.
It's going to take him a minute to download it, but [sighs] what's going to h what would happen if um we cut off our military support to the state of Israel?
Would they reform themselves? Would would that be a wakeup call for the folks over there to reform their behavior or is it too far gone?
>> Oh, no. I mean, uh it would be a wakeup call. Nothing is too far gone. Israel cannot do what it does without massive American support. And it's and to me one of the extraordinary things is how little understanding of this there is in the United States if you listen to sort of mainstream media and all of that.
What can we do to uh make them change their policy?
It's it's very simple.
uh had President Biden, you know, I I wrote this op-ed in early November 2023 saying that clearly there were war crimes or crimes against humanity already. Then four weeks into the Israeli campaign in Gaza, 10,000 people had died already, most of them civilians, most of the civilians children. And I said there are war crimes. There are crimes against humanity. This will become a genocidal campaign. It should be stopped.
President Biden could have done that. He could have told U Netanyahu, you have a week or two to wrap this up, and if you don't, you're on your own. Meaning, you're not getting our stuff.
And everything would have stopped.
Israel had no um um stocks of munitions to go on for more than two, three weeks.
It was taking already munitions that were in Israel but were American army, US Army munitions that it had no control over and were given to it. And there was a constant aerial train bringing more and more interceptors, more and more uh artillery shells. Um um obviously also vast numbers of tank engines that were coming from American factories but are German Germanade. uh Israel cannot sustain this kind of military effort for more than a few weeks without constant support, military support. Now, that's quite a part from the fact that the United States is not only giving Israel billions of dollars, many of which are then channeled in all kind of ways to provide for the settlement project in the West Bank. But also that as you know uh the US has used this veto power over and over again in the security council.
The security council would have passed already by now various sanctions on Israel had the United States not stepped in. The US now is going after the international criminal court which has taken arrest warrants against yavan the former defense minister and it's stopping a legal process an international legal process um that has said that those two men u suspected are indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity for murder extermination torture and so forth uh illegal displacement of populations. Um all of this can change of course and that would bring about a tremendous change in Israeli policy. And what is extraordinary when you listen to the Israeli media, how often Israeli commentators uh make the assumption, the immediate assumption that if we don't have this or that type of weapon, then we don't understand why we are not getting enough of it from the US. What is the problem here? It's taken for granted that all this um material would would arrive and it's taken for granted that there would be a veto in the UN. So the US can very easily change its policy visual. The reason it doesn't do it is more complicated because it's in part it's what particular presidents decide that Biden saw himself as a Zionist. I think it was surrounded by really bad uh advisers. Uh many of them I think very much influenced including Blinken, Anthony Blink, by Israeli specialists.
Uh but I think a lot of it has to do with domestic politics. Can I um yeah >> I have a very short video one more to show as a reaction and then my question is to pop as an African-American who seems to according to professor Bartov we're we're we're responsible here too it's part of our problem too how do we deal with this can we >> we're responsible as Americans I don't think we're particularly >> well I know as Americans but then we have this legacy of living through a part time >> I think that's an important question >> you know and I just need you to frame that.
>> It has to do with memory and the meaning of history and so on. And yes, I think our African-Americanness drawing on the deep well of our own experience should incline us to a more humanistic and sympathetic uh reading of the power struggle that's playing itself out in Palestine.
>> So, I've answered your question already, but uh go ahead and play your clip.
>> Short clip, just reaction. Thank you.
But don't think that decision to recognize Israel is an easy one. I had to make a compromise with the Arabs and divide Palestine. The Jews wanted to chase all the Arabs into the Tigers and Euphrates River and the Arabs want to chase all the Jews into the Red Sea. And I was trying, what I was trying to do was to find a homeland for the Jews and still be just with the Arabs. But when you go into a thing of that kind, the people you help most are the ones that get most angry with you. Both of them were against me on the situation. But as president of the United States, I paid no attention to them, carried out what I thought was right, and I had the support of the Congress, and I could do it, which is unusual in these days.
>> Can you tell us specifically that a lot of Jewish people were against you, too?
>> Oh, well, there were a lot of Jewish people against me because they wanted the whole of Palestine. As I say, they won't drive all the Arabs into Tigers from Euphrates rivers.
>> Yeah. I I wish we had a president like that now. Um Truman in that sense um is realistic uh is is stating things bluntly as he always did. uh and uh is speaking about the painful reality that still exists today. There are two peoples there. They both have a right to the land. They both feel deeply attached to it, but they have to share it. And Israel, which it wasn't then, but is now, uh is the hedgeimon. Israel is the powerful party. The Palestinians have no power right now. They can throw maybe a bomb here and there. They have no power. And so it is it is Israel that needs now and I'm sure well I'm sure I hope that Truman would have seen that too. Uh it has to be forced into a compromise. It won't do it on its own.
It doesn't have the internal dynamic for that. But once force into a corner, these elements that exist in Israeli society, that one compromise will emerge and will help lead it to a much better future for its own people, not only for Palestinians.
>> Yeah. We're going to bring Mark back in uh to uh pose a question that one of our viewers has submitted via the chat.
>> Yeah. So, this is from David Chinitz and uh he says, not really a question. Uh the antidote to this discussion is for you to have Haviv reigur on to clarify the picture that has been created. It's all the rage to dethize Israel. And then he directs us to that.
We'll give you a plug. Why not? David chinitz.substack.com.
I mean I would note the use of the word antidote and all of that implies about what he thinks about this conversation.
Um, but what what do you think about uh Havib Gur and the position that he represents?
>> That's a question to Omry.
>> Yes. Yes.
>> Yeah. You would have to tell me what that position is.
>> I'm not exactly sure what he's referring to. I was hoping you would just pick up the ball. Um, >> no idea.
>> But from just glancing through um David's uh Substack real quick, uh, and David, forgive me if I'm misrepresenting your position. um and and feel free to write in again to correct it. But it seems that what he objects to is uh a kind of external meddling in the affairs of Israel which he admits are um you know not uniformly good that there are abuses and that there are problems but that exposing them in the way that for example Nicholas Kristoff did in his recent uh piece about sexual abuse >> uh of Palestinian prisoners only gives more power to Netanyahu. which is something that um I gather uh David uh is opposed to uh not liking DB and yet um believes that Israel should have uh its sovereignty respected in so far as it handles internal affairs. Something like that. David, I'm sorry if I messed it up.
Well, if Israel's sovereignty is encapsulated in torture and rape of prisoners, then you know that's an interesting point of view. But at least one could say that you should expose that. Uh and secondly, if uh Israel is receiving massive help from another country that claims to oppose uh inhumity, then maybe it shouldn't receive it. Uh and it can do whatever it likes, but it could not appeal then uh for money and help from other countries. Um the the curious thing about uh Nicholas Kristo's piece is that none of it was surprising to Israelis.
Uh the fact that he came out in the New York Times exposed it to large numbers of people outside of Israel, but in Israel, everybody knows it. and the the uh sort of um uh clip that uh Benville showed uh of of the people from the flotilla. He has been posting clips all over the place about humiliation of Palestinian prisoners for months on end and everybody knows about it and everybody knows that there was in Man in the in the detention center that was created near Gaza. Everybody knows that there was a huge amount of torture and humiliation of people who had never been charged with anything and after months later was sent home without any charges whatsoever. But they would would never live a normal life again after what they went through. And then when that was exposed, the main debate in Israel was who leaked this information. Not who did it and why those people were not being brought to account, but why for once the legal advisor of the IDF had leaked that information, having never herself uh presented any information on what the IDF had been engaged in in Gaza itself.
So um you know this is internal affairs. Yes, every country can have its own internal affairs. Uh but if it also wants to get support from the international community and to say that it's on the right side of history uh then it should look first to uh how it treats its own people.
>> I I want to say a couple of things. One of them is the questioner is also challenging me. Why not have Jav Reikur to give the quote other side of this argument if you're going to be a fair broker? And that's a fair question. I'll think about it.
Uh the other thing I want to say is with respect to uh Nicholas Kristoff um I don't know if you've bothered to read some of the vituprative uh criticisms of the New York Times and of Kristoff in particular that have appeared all over the place in which the word blood liel appears frequently and the fact that Kristoff relies on informants who are interested parties and there are all kinds of questions about the integrity of some of ev evidence that's presented and whatnot.
But but I I wanted to use that as a way of redirecting uh Omar's attention in the time that we have remaining back to the question of genocide because that term coming from a worldrenowned historian of genocide studies is not a neutral term.
It it's a term that carries a severe moral condemnation. It's not merely a technical exercise to use that term. I wondered if you'd thought carefully about whether or not or the role you're playing and uh whether or not it's entirely appropriate uh to give an endorsement to what many would say is the extremist rhetoric uh of the anti-Israel left.
So I'll start by saying yes, I I gave it a great deal of thought. Um, and as I write in the book and as I wrote in various articles before that, um, I I spent a long time thinking about it. Um, I originally came to what I saw was an inescapable conclusion in the summer of 2024 and I then elaborated that further in the summer of 2025.
But I'll say the following. Um first of all on the sort of blood liable.
So some people have used the term genocide liable which is an interesting way of tying two things together.
One is the term genocide which is a term that has an internationally recognized definition under international law uh defined by the convention on the on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide from uh 1948 and one is liable which of course in most people's minds immediately goes back to blood liable and that means that if you say genocide you already saying something anti-Semitic. That's the the illusion.
And there is a Holocaust scholar who I respect as a scholar who has said that about me that I am spreading the genocide liable. Meaning that my use of the term genocide uh whether I am or not anti-semitic is anti-Semitic.
Uh, and I I find that um I'm I'm trying to look for the right word. I would say scandalous, but that's not really what I'm what I'm trying to say. It's it's completely beside the point. And the reason is this. In 1948, uh, a definition of genocide was endorsed by the UN. Uh it was a definition uh and it was an undertaking.
Samantha Pow wrote about that already a good 30 years ago I think. Um uh it was an attempt by a Jewish po Polish lawyer called Rafael Lmin who escaped from Poland who came to the United States and in 1944 wrote a book in which there was a chapter on genocide and he described what he believed was genocide which was the attempt to destroy a particular group um and not just large numbers of individuals but a group as a group. uh when he started thinking about that, it was before the Holocaust. He started thinking about it in the 1930s. And what he thought about was the genocide, which then did not have a name, of course, the mass murder of the Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in World War I. And he identified something that was different from simply killing large numbers of people, but an actual attempt to eradicate the group, its history, its memory, its language, everything that is that group. Even if individuals survive, the group will disappear. And that um led to the endorsement by the UN of the genocide convention, which says that genocide are actions carried out or acts carried out with the intent to destroy a particular group, an ethnic or national, religious or or or racial group in whole or in part as such.
That's a definition under international law. Now, it's true that over time since Rafa Lenin coined the term, people use that term also as a term of outrage. And when they see something terrible happening, they say it must be genocide.
What else would it be? Uh, and that's a problem with the term like with other ter terminology. Um but the only way that I can think about genocide is whether it corresponds to their definition. There are other people who say that genocide can't be or an event cannot be genocide if it doesn't look like the Holocaust. If there are no extermination camps, if there's no bureaucracy, if there are no shooting pits, then it can't be genocide. But again, that's an emotional or sometimes a propagodistic argument, but that is not relevant to the definition of genocide under international law. Now, there are states that are signitories to that convention. The state of Israel is a signatory to that convention. Germany is, France is, the UK is, and the US joined it in the 1980s.
All states that are signitories to that convention and that definition are duty bound to try and prevent genocide when they see it about to happen and to stop those who carried it out and punish them when they can. That's part of being a signatory to a convention.
There is no convention on crimes against humanity, but there is one on genocide.
Um and so when I specifically was uh trying to understand what was happening in Gaza, uh the first thing that one could see and that I wrote about was that statements had been made by political and military leaders in Israel, people with executive authority in the immediate aftermath of October 7th which had a genocidal content. They spoke about uh they will have no water, they will have no food, they will have no energy. They're human animals and they will be treated as such. They're no uninvolved people. Remember Amalecch.
Amalecch of course has an injunction in the Bible to eradicate them all. Uh their cattle, sheep, men, women, children, sucklings, and so forth. Uh and every Israeli citizen knows what that means. So these statements were made right away. And the question was whether these were statements being made on the spur of the moment and the the heat of the moment in rage for the massacre by Hamas or were they actually uh a suggestion that that would be the policy. And by the spring of 2024, it became clear that the pattern of operations of the IDF was indeed geared to make Gaza as a territory entirely uninhabitable for its population. that the idea for systematically and deliberately destroying housing, destroying hospitals, destroying schools, universities, water plants, food plants, archives, museums, everything, agricultural land, and pushing the population to the south with the goal of ethnically cleansing it. Now unlike in 1948 where the population the Palestinian population 750,000 of them at the time could flee this time the borders were closed. People could not cross into Israel which is most of the um borders of Gaza or into Egypt because Egypt also closed its border. And so ethnic cleansing became genocide. It became an attempt to make it impossible for people to live and to make it impossible for them to resurrect themselves to reconstitute themselves as a group after the violence was over. So for my mind in to my mind this was clearly a genocidal operation. There were many many more such statements made over time of course by Israeli politicians and army people.
And since I wrote that for the first time in August of 24, this has become the consensus among genocide scholars and and experts in international law. And those who say that this is anti-semitic are completely beside the point. It's got nothing to do with anti-semitism. It has to do directly with the actions that Israel has been conducting. And trying to evade that or use ad hominum uh to deny that is not helpful and will not help because the actions that have taken place and have been uh quite well documented will not be denied by these kind of just empty allegations.
Well, I can hear um people going ball histic uh about this. If Israel wanted to kill all of the Palestinians, all of the Gazins, it would have been easy to do. It has the power to do it. It didn't do it. Uh it uh is dealing with an implacable foe uh who uses its civilian population as human shields uh and uh so on. uh and uh it is involved in a uh life or death uh propaganda struggle or narrative control struggle uh in which this kind of uh language is uh uh very very unhelpful.
Um, so, um, I'm doing [clears throat] my best to try to at least evoke, uh, uh, the concerns that people who don't agree with you would have, uh, Omar, but I want to ask you a different kind of question.
Um, you're an Israeli, uh, you're Jewish, uh, you're an American, and you're living in the United States.
You've talked about the American Jewish community here.
uh what kind of relationship do you have with the American Jewish community and has it been adversely affected by what you've been saying the last few years?
>> Uh yeah, so let let me just say that people who um want to know more about um how I came to the conclusion that I was elaborating here are welcome to read the book and they'll get much more of that.
Um it I'm you know um I once sort of uh said that when when when you leave uh your home at a at a certain point uh you never entirely come home. So I've lived in this country for half of my life and I've been away from Israel for half of my life. Uh, and I'm not entirely I've never been entirely at home in either place. I have a relationship with the Jewish community, but I I've never in truth thought of myself as a Jewish American.
Um, I I teach or I have taught because I'm about to retire uh for many years at American institutions. This country has been very good to me and to my wife. We both came from other countries and we were welcomed here more than I think at any other country and are very grateful for that. Um but I've never felt entirely American and when I come to Ezra I don't feel entirely Israeli anymore. So uh in that sense when you leave home you never come back. Um, but my relationship with the American Jewish community, if I can if I know what it is, because of course it depends on that community, uh, not just on me.
Um, I think it's changed u as a result of what I've been writing. uh and I can say for sure that I know that um the people that I speak to, the audiences that I address have changed.
Uh there are places where I believe I'm not so welcome anymore and there are places where I think I am more welcome than I used to be. I don't try to think about it too much because I'm not speaking um or articulating my views because I want to be liked or accepted by one community or another. I'm truly trying to simply write what I think in the most uh in the clearest, the most dispassionate but also empathetic way that I can. And what effect that has um troubles me only in the sense that I hope people can see through the huge amount of fog and obfuscation and propaganda and denial and sheer lies uh that are filling uh the air these days.
Um, and I know that some people find it very difficult to hear what I say, but I just think it's important for them to think why is it difficult for them?
Is it difficult for them because this is causing a heartbreak?
Uh, is it something personal? Is it because you feel that a place that you loved or that you had a strong intimate link to is behaving in ways that are unacceptable to you and therefore you don't want to know about it. Uh and if it is that um then for the love of that place or for the sense of caring for it uh you should be um you should be able to look the truth in the face as you would do I guess with a family member who is dear to you. uh rather than deny things and say anyone who says something bad about the place I like must hate the place I like and therefore hate me too. Uh I don't come from a place of hate.
I care a great deal about Israel. Uh most of my best friends live there. I have family there.
uh but I see what I see and I understand it the way I understand it and I think that for the good of that place what it is going through and what it is doing has to be um shown has to be analyzed because that's the only way that we can take it in a different in a better direction.
>> All right.
Well, I thank you for coming on the show. I thank you for everything that you're doing in your work. Uh, and commend to the attention of the audience your book Israel, what went wrong. Uh, it's full of very interesting history [music] and commentary on contemporary affairs.
So, thanks very much, Homer.
>> Thank you. Thank you, Glenn. And thank you, everybody else.
>> [music]
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